Judge in N.C.A.A. Case Known as Evenhanded

By JOHN BRANCH

August 10, 2014

For years, Claudia Wilken has been known in her neighborhood mostly as a familiar face at school meetings. When her two children were teenagers about a decade ago, growing up a few blocks from the campus of the University of California, Berkeley, Wilken spent several years on Berkeley High School’s Site Council, involved in curriculum and funding decisions.

Amid the peculiar politics found at the confluence of school governance and parental involvement, hers was a measured voice. Let’s figure out how we can work together, she would say. She encouraged compromise and dialogue.

“What most amazed me was that people knew her but didn’t know she was a federal district judge,” said Kriss Worthington, a longtime Berkeley City Council member from Wilken’s district. “She carries herself without pretension and without puffing herself up.”

With one major decision last week, in what is known as the O’Bannon case, Wilken may forever be remembered as the judge who helped reshape college athletics — who shook the settled, artificial world of collegiate sports like a snow globe, sending pieces swirling to form a new landscape.

And to think: It was only in recent weeks that Wilken, apparently not a huge sports fan, playfully admitted that the abbreviation S.E.C. brought to mind the Securities and Exchange Commission, not the Southeastern Conference. During one day’s testimony, when the questioning involved conference realignment, Wilken sounded perplexed.

“You mean these schools can be in whatever conference they want?” she asked.

On Friday afternoon, she released a 99-page decision concluding that much of the way in which the N.C.A.A. viewed its athletes as amateurs was wrong. The N.C.A.A. on Sunday vowed to appeal, but the pieces are far from settled, thanks to a woman few sports fans would recognize by name or face.

Wilken, 65 this year, has been a United States District Court judge for the Northern District of California for more than 20 years, appointed by President Bill Clinton in 1993. While several of her notable cases — involving topics such as term limits, offshore oil drilling, the Defense of Marriage Act, even public nudity in Berkeley — have invited media scrutiny and legal debate, Wilken’s private life has generally not drawn attention.

She lives fairly anonymously in a modest home with her husband, Judge John True of Alameda County Superior Court. They chose not to send their children, now grown, to prestigious private schools because they cherished the diversity of Berkeley’s public schools. It is a view as unpretentious as Wilken, who insists that no one rise when she enters the courtroom.

She has a reputation as a fair-minded, good-humored referee who prizes efficiency and directness. This summer, she spent most of a day in her Oakland courtroom overseeing testimony in the O’Bannon case. When that ended, she oversaw a pretrial motion in another series of cases questioning the N.C.A.A.’s model, including a seminal suit known as the Kessler case. A gaggle of lawyers jockeyed over who would be the lead counsel.

“Everybody can’t be the lead,” Wilken said. “All the children can’t be above average.”

On Friday, in the case named for the former U.C.L.A. basketball player Ed O’Bannon, Wilken ruled that the N.C.A.A. could not prevent college athletes from earning money on the use of their names and images in video games and on television broadcasts. While that made a deep dent in the N.C.A.A.’s longstanding view of amateurism in an increasingly capitalistic sports world, it placed strict limits on how and when money could be earned, and it left open plenty of questions about how altered rules might be applied.

In other words, Wilken’s decision may be interpreted much the way her advice at school meetings often was: Let’s work it out, through dialogue and compromise.

The variety of cases she has heard over the years is wide. The sides have included technological giants (Apple, Oracle, Microsoft, Adobe and others) and retail behemoths (Walmart and Target) and have ranged from ordinary citizens to the United States Justice Department. Among her notable rulings in recent years, she stopped California from making reductions in home health care services and allowed gay and lesbian state employees to sue for insurance coverage for their spouses and partners.

Like any judge, she has to become an instant expert on topics she may know little about — even, say, college sports.

“She’s an intellectual,” said Helen Moore, a clerk for Wilken in 1990 and 1991 who has spent the past 13 years as counsel for the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority. “A lot of cases present interesting intellectual issues, and that really piques her interest. She wants to hear both sides, and she really thinks deeply about both sides. The attorneys on both sides will cite case law to support their arguments, and she gets her clerks hopping, researching all the case law being cited.”

Wilken was born in Minneapolis in 1949 and earned an undergraduate degree from Stanford in 1971. She headed across the San Francisco Bay to Cal’s Boalt Hall law school, where True was a classmate. Both graduated in 1975. True has a deep background in labor and employment law and became a judge in 2003.

Wilken began as a federal public defender, then went into private practice from 1978 to 1984 while teaching at Cal as an adjunct professor. Moving into the judge’s chair, she worked as a federal magistrate for about a decade before Clinton elevated her, and the United States Senate quickly confirmed her in November 1993.

Wilken became chief judge for the Northern District in 2012, but she recently announced that she would step down from the position this year, which will relieve her of some administrative duties.

In the courtroom, Wilken leaves little doubt that she is in charge. Several times early in the O’Bannon case, she admonished lawyers who interrupted her. She paid serious attention to testimony, eyes fixed on lawyers and witnesses, absorbing the information, particularly when it involved the machinations of college sports.

But there were bits of comic relief, too. She routinely smiled at the verbal jousts of opposing lawyers. And when one witness called a question “stupid,” something that might have earned a rebuke from other judges, Wilken laughed.

“Judge Claudia Wilken is a rare example of a fine combination of intellect and empathy,” said Tony Serra, a San Francisco civil rights lawyer who has defended the likes of Huey Newton and the Hells Angels. “That’s her in a nutshell. She’s very considerate. She’s very compassionate. She is very gifted in the scholarly abstract thought that a good judge must have.”

“From my perspective, she is a very fine judge,” Serra said. “I certainly don’t have that opinion of most judges.”

Worthington, the City Council member, said he sometimes saw Wilken in passing and sometimes saw her name attached to major court cases. It can be hard to connect that they are the same person, he said.

“Unrelated to any of her rulings, she is just an average person, very genuine and thoughtful,” Worthington said. “There are a lot of fights over a lot of issues in Berkeley. She’s not like a lot of people who go ballistic. She just says, ‘Let’s all just figure out how we can work together.’ ”